Boozehound - Jason Wilson [30]
Oranges are one thing, but what about açai-blueberry? “Americans like bold taste, overwhelming taste,” he said, chuckling. “We don’t have this taste in Europe.”
During my visit, Vos told me Van Gogh’s next vodka would be “absinthe-flavored,” and he let me taste it, along with some other flavor ideas he has been working on, including ginger, cucumber, and grapefruit. There were also interesting mash-ups of fruits and plants: pear-geranium, violet-cherry, lavender-yuzu. After the tasting, Vos and I had lunch at a restaurant that was inside a windmill, where we drank a beer and an oude genever—a kopstoot.
Later that afternoon, I paid a call to another distiller, UTO, a few blocks away, past the windmill. UTO makes the Sonnema VodkaHerb that had been marketed heavily at Tales of the Cocktail. It’s tough to edge into the U.S. vodka market. At UTO, I tasted a beautiful oude genever, Notaris, which was aged like whiskey. I also tasted Sonnema’s Berenburg, a dark, bitter herbal liqueur, akin to an Italian amaro, that’s extremely popular in the Netherlands. Sonnema uses a bit of the Berenburg formula of seventy-one herbs in the secret recipe for VodkaHerb.
I asked Edwin Holleman, UTO’s commercial director, how well Sonnema VodkaHerb sells in Holland. “There is almost no premium vodka market here,” he said. “People can buy a liter of genever for eight or nine euros. No one in Holland is going to pay twenty-nine euros for a vodka.”
There’s always America, I guess. Actually, after I left Schiedam, I’d developed a vague theory on the flavored-vodka thing: it’s a European conspiracy foisted upon unwitting American consumers to see just how far we’ll go into the realm of the absurd. I imagined a distiller (perhaps wearing a beret, or lederhosen, or wooden shoes) snickering as he chatted with his importer: “They drank mojito mint? Really? And espresso vodka? Dude, seriously? It was brown! Yeah, that was a good one. Okay, well, here’s one that’ll really give us a laugh. Let’s send them bubble gum and see what happens!”
A Round of Drinks:
Unearthing the Past
It’s mind-boggling how many fascinating spirits disappeared during Prohibition—and equally mind-boggling how many of these have been “rediscovered” and become available in the last years of the first decade of the twenty-first century. So much more cocktail acumen—more historical insight, finer technique, cooler tools—exists in the world now than did in, say, 2007. It feels as though it took us seven decades to move from the Dark Ages of Prohibition to the Early Renaissance of Cocktails. Then, in a matter of months, we leapt from the Renaissance to the baroque and the rococo.
Remember, until 2007, many of the spirits I’m writing about simply were not available except, maybe, if you went abroad. For example, now that real sloe gin can be had in the United States for the first time in generations, creative bartenders have made the old new again. That was the case with the following cocktail, which was on the menu at the gone-but-not-forgotten Washington, D.C., speakeasy Hummingbird to Mars.
PHILLY SLING
Serves 1
1 ½ ounces applejack
1 ounce Plymouth sloe gin
¾ ounce freshly squeezed lemon juice
¼ ounce simple syrup
2 dashes Angostura bitters
Fill a mixing glass halfway with ice. Add the applejack, sloe gin, lemon juice, simple syrup, and bitters. Stir vigorously, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
Recipe by Derek Brown of the Passenger and the Columbia Room, Washington, D.C.
When I first began writing about cocktails in 2007, I published a recipe for the Aviation cocktail, a classic drink from the early twentieth century and one of my favorites. At the time, I called for gin, freshly squeezed